fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude's metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak,
tumbled about in the sitting-places. There were pink silk blinds in the windows,
by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the chimney-piece was
disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with coarse, dirty-looking lace.
»I have been making myself a little comfortable,« said the Baroness, much to the
confusion of Charlotte, who had been on the point of proposing to come and help
her put her superfluous draperies away. But what Charlotte mistook for an almost
culpably delayed subsidence Gertrude very presently perceived to be the most
ingenious, the most interesting, the most romantic intention. »What is life,
indeed, without curtains?« she secretly asked herself; and she appeared to
herself to have been leading hitherto an existence singularly garish and totally
devoid of festoons.
    Felix was not a young man who troubled himself greatly about anything -
least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of enjoyment was so
large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of it that it had a permanent
advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His sentient faculty was intrinsically
joyous, and novelty and change were in themselves a delight to him. As they had
come to him with a great deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable
than appeared. Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not a
restless, apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race with the tyranny of
fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as to put Adversity off her guard, dodging
and evading her with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted flower. Felix
extracted entertainment from all things, and all his faculties - his
imagination, his intelligence, his affections, his senses - had a hand in the
game. It seemed to him that Eugenia and he had been very well treated; there was
something absolutely touching in that combination of paternal liberality and
social considerateness which marked Mr. Wentworth's deportment. It was most
uncommonly kind of him, for instance, to have given them a house. Felix was
positively amused at having a house of his own; for the little white cottage
among the apple-trees - the chalet, as Madame Münster always called it - was
much more sensibly his own than any domiciliary quatrième, looking upon a court,
with the rent overdue. Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into
courts, with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge
of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette